


aftermath

by bodysnatch3r



Series: THE VOICE IS STILLED [6]
Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:06:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24526591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodysnatch3r/pseuds/bodysnatch3r
Summary: While his world dies, he's left alone, shaped like a ghost. Roland, after the fall of Gilead and the disastrous battle of Jericho Hill, learns slowly what it means to be a memory.WARNINGS:Mention of hunting, animal butchering.
Series: THE VOICE IS STILLED [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1725325





	aftermath

**i.**

It is not called refuge. It cannot be granted the mercy of that name.

It is: respite. It is: a roof. It is: the moment in a nightmare where you forget this isn’t real. It is: the choking feeling of the fall. It is: waking up in your bed and it’s cold, and the dream still tries to drown you.

It is not refuge. Refuge would imply that there is any comfort left to be found. On the floor, in his bedroll, by the weak embers of a fire he’s too tired to tend to. He lingers. Trapped, between sleep and wakefulness, between pain with two different faces. The constant changes shape, becomes unrecognisable, unstoppable. The dead walk regardless of his state, leave him unending, bewildering, an animal wide-eyed unable to escape the snare around its neck. 

Beside the smell of the rotting wood he hears the soft hush of the lake. Waves, circling in their place against the shore and then away from it. Never the same two molecules of water pressing up against the rock. Always the same terrible rhythm. And the lake does not _know_. And the lake does not _understand_ the enormity of what an empire falling means. The lake has horror of greater magnitudes to contend with. The lake listens to sounds Roland will never know how to hear, cannot be taught how to. The lake knows poison like flesh, and knows the clearest morning before the radiation melted the bones of the fish who, like the women and children of Gilead, crowded in the tunnels of their own making, and waited, perhaps forever, to be burned beyond all recognition and meek hope. 

The repetition of the waves dragging in and out like hands reaching and being torn away. If he closes his eyes, the smell is still the smell of flesh burning. Sick. Sweet. Like hogs, only the smoke their bodies let go of reeked of all the dreams and hearts they’d lost. Prayers too late to be heard by anyone living. Just the dead, always, always singing. First in the hallways and tunnels of Gilead. Then at every loyalist homestead. And some of the fires they had burned too. Watched Troitan men scream with a coolness and terrible righteousness. 

The stench of sweet flesh. The cold, wet smell of the lake now. In the caustic days that followed Jericho Hill he remembers most strongly the pain. Something had regurgitated him: terrible, all-knowing, a grief that stank, reeked, of things so much bigger than it could have been. A beginning of the end of a world. A grief that bled like the end of the universe and became all that more painful in the realisation that it was never going to end, that this was the definitive aftermath.

In that night after he had left the bloated dead behind, his clothes and hands a copy of the stench of burning bodies, he had discovered his pain had moved, from all over his body to curled in the root of his throat. Above the heart. He had discovered the only respite from it was mutilation. As his braids burned in the campfire he was too cold to care about, the pain had become like air, incantations for a poetry he lacked the language and horror to bask in. Like air, a thing everywhere. In every crevice. Deep in his pockets and his clothes and his gunna. Like the sand of a desert he was not yet ready to see and yet already knew the secret name of.

Some things, over and over, became like second skin. In a previous life he knew its name and all the syllables that vast terror was made of. So he recalled them like a distant dream or song. 

_Resumption_ , which was ever the curse of daylight.

But here at the lake it was too early for that comfortable kind of suffering, the suffering that was a friend, that then became bleached by the sun and brittle like the bones that in Hambry had been called bad omens. 

Here the sense was different. The water still too murky. The sensation all too raw. In the weeks since he’d left Jerico Hill the whole ugly, writhing mass of Mid-World had revealed itself to him, like some terrible, rotting stain on a map already fraying in the water. Left in a box for too long and now ruined beyond salvation. The box opened, the stench, terrible and overpowering, of paper rotten beyond repair. So precious. Left to go to waste. Along the empty echoes of what once was Lake Saroni and now was simply a grave too big to describe, he had found a shack and decided here was where he would rest his body if not his mind. 

His hair was growing in, tight curls against his scalp. The scabs of where he’d cut too close to skin a pinprick, something like stigmata or penance or nothing at all. Gestures hardly had meaning. In the root of his throat where the pain had found a home the folly of his obsession is becoming function more and more.

The body, once stripped of its arms and legs, still finds a way to crawl forward. 

* * *

**ii.**

The light plays a fierce game through the aching rafters. The wood, old, bleached, bone-white, bent by the wind and the sun and the relentless gnaw of time too bloated with its ruins to care about what it ate, and the tiles of the roof above those rafters, that older wood still, that old god of an old town.

Time sleeps at the centre of Hendrickson in great heaving, awe-some breaths. The sound it makes, the endless, dauntless grind of teutonic plates that have nowhere to go but forward, always, still. And he remembers when he was seventeen and his father brought him with him on a trail and he remembers the miners staring at them from beneath their hats, white eyes in the dusk of their permanently dirty faces, and the donkeys, and the way the ground ached when the blackpowder went off.

John Farson ended the ore mining as soon as he took the town. The miners were glad they no longer had to go into the ground for the gunslingers’ iron and die for the gunslingers’ iron and suffocate for the gunslingers’ iron.

They had moved on. Gone elsewhere. Passed on. Crossed borders Roland had never had to question himself about, in his high white tower with the stained-glass windows.

The stew is watery. He doesn’t think the meat is meat, unless one considers the echo of a thing the thing itself, and there’s little else in the stew besides the grey, greasy lumps. Nettle, perhaps, but it’s so cooked it’s turned to fragments, floating in the broth. It’s too salty. 

And it’s the first hot meal he’s had in days. 

His body in the meantime learns what it’s like to be warm. The sensation when he first walked into the pub was something like finding a heartbeat again, thawing blood so it could stain the snow. Remembering where his hands were. Remembering his name and his eyes, his throat and the guns stuffed in the bottom of his _gunna_ , slung over his shoulder. 

So close to the heart of the horror, he cannot trust the men and women not to see those guns as symbols of something to eradicate. He keeps his head low and his hat on and his red red scarf around his throat, trusts in the shadows of his dead friends to cover the blue, the prying, to cover the murmurs long enough for him to eat his not-stew in this tavern that has nothing of home or of respite here, no place of comfort for weary travellers, just a hard tavern, a hard soil, a cold soil. The trappers and the whores and the old soldiers with their wounds and little else to show for their effort in a glorious, stinking revolution. If Roland knew any better, knew better how empires were made and then crumbled, he’d see already the death pangs of Farson’s regime. 

Already. Only months after the ruinous victory. 

Where the light from the roof in disrepair dipped into the lives of the patrons below, snowflakes start dripping instead. Under the door, the cold-as-wind crawls on all fours and surprises his ankles. He kicks it to chase it away, and it wails and growls and does not leave him alone, and his body is lost to it again.

At the table beside him, turned away from them so they do not see his face, the old mountain man has just won another round of cards. His companions groan their frustration. The cards are thick, old, stained. Their jacks and jills and jokers stare back at the players with rubbed-out, fading eyes. Their magic is long gone. One of the staves card is flecked lightly with ancient blood.

Whatever power they had, they’ve been snapped in half, sucked dry of it.

It will take time to remember the levels of _khef_. Grief has taken his braids from him, it has nicked the shine of his eyes, it is eating holes in his memory. It will start to dull the senses. It will remove him from his body entirely, first, before returning him to it an even sharper blade, quicker draw, bitter blood.

Whatever the proving was, a test of manhood, a child’s foolish gamble, it was nothing compared to the war and the terrible loneliness. It was he realises now _preparation_ , a learning of death’s meaning, before the great leap and the great beginning, and the centre changing its shape. From white spires to endless stairs. From laughter to singing, to singing, light, terrible, terrible singing.

The snow doesn’t last. It’s spring, the first birthpangs of it, and snow in spring never lasts, though it can creep inside marrow just as easily. The stew sits badly in his stomach.

A woman at the bar laughs, too loudly. Dishonestly. Rickety, hiccuping, shrill. It buries itself in her shriek when the man she’s with pours whiskey down the front of her dress, and then the sound is a thing both angry and too drunk to care. 

It is not even afternoon yet.

The chair scrapes hard against dirtwood, and his duster rustles while he moves. He pulls his scarf up over his face and his hat down, head bowed. To leave, there is no need for throat taps or any other incantations. The mountains here do not need superstition – they have their own dark belief. 

The sun has hidden behind clouds again. Over towards the horizon, the moon hangs low in the sky in a terrible, nauseating halo. She should not be here. She should be dead. She _is_ dead, to an extent. She is pale and the sun can overpower her easily. 

She should not be seen here. She should not be seen alive.

In the centre of Hendrickson, a great unwanted animal rests now that its blood pact has been sealed. It sleeps, and Roland understands enough of the world to barely be aware that it will never need to wake again. What had to be done has been done. What price _ka_ demanded has been paid and then some. 

Three stuffy-guys hang from the old gallows. Even the wood here is dirt, is dry, is cracked by the constant cycle of wet and cold, of snow and frost, of sun and then clouds and then wood cracks, bursts, roofs lose their tiles.

Time, here, has gutted them. The cloth is rotting. The hay has fallen out in clumps. In shaking low-speech letters, _THE DYNH_ , _THE RIGH_ , _THE LEVT_. Robert Allgood would call it _phonetic transliteration_ , and then laugh, and then add, _not typical of men of letters_. 

He saw them already on his way in. Now he looks at them closer, at the signs around their necks, at the skulls crudely drawn where the faces should be. The hands are red. In Mejis, the stuffy-guys are burned. Here in the cold and in the West, they are left outside to freeze and thaw and freeze and thaw. And rot. Like bodies, they rot, their innards splashing to the ground in stinking, oozing heaps.

A rat crawls out of the straw on the ground beneath Steven Deschain. He has grown used to the effigy of his father’s death. He has seen it repeated, in all of his dreams, in daguerrotypes and engravings and a million, million drinking songs that celebrate the death of children. 

In ten years’ time they will be forgotten, like everything else, everyone else, like he will forget the white sandstone without ever truly forgetting it, the colour of the candles, the scent of his mother’s hair oil, the blood his second water, mother’s milk. 

Time sways gently in the wind. The old rope around Robert Allgood’s neck creaks. Footsteps on the wooden floor. Gently, gently, as to not wake the household. His drunken giggles buried in the warmth of Cuthbert’s neck. No giggles then. Just gasps.

“They say there’s still one left.”

The man walked behind him and made no sound. It is what scares Roland the most, the not-hearing, the knowledge that someone, the first one in so long, could find the pockets where silence can be bent at will and use it the same way he himself has used it so often.

Out of the corner of his eye, when Roland does not answer, the newcomer smiles. 

“Of course, that probably is just hearsay. An old wives’ tale. Ain’t not one of them left. They all died on the slopes of Jericho.”

The voice scrapes against the insides of Roland’s skull. 

Vannay died. 

Vannay died when the city fell. They knew it. They knew it all. Vannay died when the city fell. 

And even if he hadn’t, he would have been killed eventually. No mercy. No quarter.

Beside himself, he sees a thick grey moustache, and scraggly, shoulder-length hair, and if he blinks he knows it will be gone. So he doesn’t. He barely breathes. He watches his father hang from the gallows.

“And even if there was one left, it wouldn’t be much living, would it? While his world dies, he’s left alive. Ain’t much you can share with a ghost. Hunted to the ends of the earth and beyond it.”

The sound of spitting. When Roland blinks his cheeks are wet, and so he knows he still exists. 

“An old wives’ tale. You have a good day now, sai.”

He nods an answer. If he swallows his throat is tighter than it was before. Snowflakes fall again. His father and his tet-mates sway slowly in the swirling flakes, like wind-chimes, like bones.

* * *

**iii.**

He stops by the side of the water. The river was maybe once a river, now carried the memory of it: little more than mud where the animals could drink and try to remember what summer and spring would taste like. Enough, to wash his hands and face, to cleanse his neck.

The rustle makes the breath change and the air move: at the bottom of his vision, on the edges of it, he sees a deer or what perhaps used to be a deer. Like the river it remembers the memories of its shape but fails to recollect the details. It is what a child might think a deer to be. It is what a man would draw, if he had only ever been described a deer and never seen it.

Like so much in their shared world it’s dead and breathing on borrowed air. The leaves it moved, the dead things underneath Roland’s boots, are ghosts. And it is a ghost also, the skin of its face translucent, transparent. It was born with no throat and the infection of its exposed skin has been eating away at the lungs. It leans down further upstream, its head bows. Roland sees the water, the mud-stained stench of water, drip down its throat in rivets. It barely swallows, it’s missing the parts that make swallowing possible. 

Still its flesh, what little isn’t eaten away by its cancer, will make for good meat. He can use the teeth to barter with the old man, half-blind himself, that perhaps lives in these woods and perhaps drew the deer he sees in front of him. The man ate god, he’s sure of it, and now knows the true name of the wind. He can eat the meat of this not-deer, and it can sustain him until he reaches the town by the desert. In Princetown he will buy a mule and hopefully it will sustain him past Tull and until he reaches the mountains. 

After that, he will see.

He is very slow as he leans down, wet hands, to grip the sandalwood. The not-deer does not notice. Drinks and drinks, head pressed to the stream as it drops more water than it can swallow. Ravenous. Thinking that the more water it drinks the slower death will remember its name.

One bullet. Through the eyes. The dark leaves spatter with darker brain matter, red blood turned black by the moonlight. Death watches it softly for a few moments as it flails. Perhaps there is a second brain, a pocket of cancerous cells that turned into a machine of consciousness. However brief. A flittering of thoughts made transparent, blue butterflies against the grain of the darker, more pressing doom. Death soon. Death now.

Death aims again and this time for the heart. Whatever secondary brain there is, without blood it is just cells. The second bullet hits. It freezes. It falls, into the water, and the water turns pink and red downstream. 

Roland walks to it surrounded by its own gore washed away in the mud. He leans down and picks it up, moves it to the banks, a dead hunk of meat he drags to someplace dry beside his fire. In the light that is red like the deer’s blood will never be again, he skins it as best he can. 

The wordless eyes still open stare at him as he does. He feels its ghost behind and beside him. It waits for the moment he will let his guard down and then it will remind him wailing of what this world has lost. He was born in a world already lost. They all were.

He is the only one left who can see, who can understand. Time has given him context if not memories, and context here in the thin neck of the Great Western Forest is as valuable as freshwater rain. He sniffles when, while gutting, he finds the cancerous mass in the deer’s abdomen, the remnants of what perhaps dreamed of being a brain. He holds it in his hand. The size of a ripe apple. No dreams, here. Barely any conscious thought. Perhaps a cross-fire, the answer to the seizures that would rack its body and bring it to its knees without it understanding why.

The only dreams it ever had were the ones safe behind its bulging eyes. He drops that mass of cells and gifts it to the wolves that will come once he moves on.

He finishes transforming the animal from body to flesh and then leaves the carcass on the forest floor. In time, it will learn how to bloom, violets and moss and mushrooms, though he has never concerned himself much with the business of flowers. That was his mother’s kingdom. That was Cuthbert’s dancing grounds. 

The flesh he sets above the fire to slowly dry. It will become meat as he rests for a few hours before the sun rises and he begins again, this dance. The last thing he does with the deer is take its teeth.

Only a few days ahead of him, darkness laughs. It blooms red in the water as he cleans his hands.

* * *

It’s the rustling that wakes him. It catches the edges of the dream he was about to sink into, the smell of someone’s hair, their name just beyond his reach, and yanks it from underneath him. He wakes with a start, hand to his father’s dagger and to the gun beside his head.

He expects a wolf, already eating the carcass. But he opens his eyes and there’s no wolf. The noise is further than he thought.

He moves silently and traces it back to the stream. On its banks, something drags itself in the underbrush. He sees it as dawn traces its shape, in the light, in a heartbeat.

Much like its mother the fawn is a fawn only because language has not yet found any easy words to describe it. Cain reborn and redeemed, it carries Abel on its back, the vestigial remnants of a sister conceived dead it tried to absorb in the womb. 

And it screams. 

For its mother, stripped of her identity and lying in the leaves with what’s left of her skin and her body – unlikely, although the thought briefly crosses Roland’s mind before he’s able to smother it. For the pain – more likely, as its skin melts away on its legs to reveal raw, bleeding muscle, the effects of radiation poisoning. Body burning body, body folding over itself, body eating itself, body stripped of signifier and signified. It screams the way its mother tried to drink: like it will keep it alive. 

It screams because it waited for hours hiding in the bushes for its mother to return and then she didn’t so it grew hungry and thirsty. Barely deers, yet behaviour always remains the same. Some rules take too long to be broken: some rules stay even if the bodies enacting their rituals are barely what they used to be. The memories of deer. 

Not-deer. 

Roland watches it for a moment. They are both orphans. It is the briefest of connections. They are both orphans, and they were both orphaned by the same gun Roland uses, now, to put the fawn out of its misery.

It only takes one bullet. 

Its blood bleeds red into the sky, the sun crawling slowly past the clouds. He smokes a cigarette to watch it, before returning to camp, packing the dried meat up, rinsing his mug to make himself bitter chicory coffee with the water in his waterskin. When it’s done, and he’s finished his second cigarette, he kicks the fire out and packs the rest of his gunna and crosses the stream, leaves the mother and her children behind. 

* * *

He spends the night in the old man’s hut. 

Screaming, beyond the woods, wakes him from a lighter sleep. The man is sitting by the fire and his head is tilted. He is listening, also. They wait with each other for the screams to die down. They do not.

Roland goes back to sleep.

* * *

He thinks he will reach Princetown by nightfall. If not, he will reach it sometime in the morning. 

* * *

He walked all night without noticing he did. The ground he covered slipped off the sky like flesh off an old bone now rotting and hummed, low, steam rising from it as if it had rained. Maybe it had. Rain and time were close, bedfellows, and perhaps it had rained and simply hadn’t reached the forest past the trees. Or perhaps it had already rained and he hadn’t noticed.

His clothes aren’t wet. Perhaps it had rained before but then time had decided to turn away from that crack in the world. Perhaps it had rained, but time hadn’t cared long enough to let it linger more than an afterthought. All it had given was the steam, sweet as whiskey. 

A memory of rain, the steam. It curls in the morning air shrill with its own rage. Losing itself like blood loses its colour when mixed with seed. 

The bleating scream comes behind him, then. Something that must be heard and not seen. Some secret of the land and the earth now fully revealed to him. He had thought it a coincidence the night in the old man’s hut. Now he knows it better, and knows also that this world does not breathe with coincidences anymore, does not ride in their wild, mad hunt. Coincidence is antiquated. 

Here there is only concatenation. A chain to hold a tower down.

He pauses. The sound, repeated, scrapes against his bones, rutting for marrow. His grip around the strap of his gunna tightens. Cain behind him carries Abel. His footsteps are lighter despite himself now that he knows he has a walking companion.

Sometimes things, here, take a little while to die and stay dead.

When he reaches Princetown the morning is still too young to be called day. It tinges the sky a malevolent green, further down towards the desert and then the mountains barely sketched out in the mist and the clouds. The steam has gone. 

Down the street, cracked tarmac and all, he sees the lamplighter slowly snuffing the lights out. One, and then one, and then one. The scream again. She does not seem to notice, intent in her solitary work. 

One of the last big cities left alive, if alive is a word that can be used at all. Little more than a ghost town. Little less than a cemetery dance. Drawn by a hand that knew, perhaps had even seen, what Gilead once was. Too old to remember all the beauty of it.

But the oil lamps, so much like the gas lamps of a world strung high with its throat cut to bleed. The gas lamps, slowly snuffed one by one as the woman and her long pole with its old hook come closer and closer. He has stopped on the outskirts as a town mostly boarded up rises like some great slumbering beast to greet a new morning in its own radioactive haze. Its own dust more ash than earth. 

He looks over his shoulder and sees the reflection of the world he was not supposed to see. It is a flicker, a candle-flame, the shimmering, leftover shape of the fawn that had died wrapping itself around his bullet. Welcoming the lead in its mouth as the blood bubbled terrible and black past its teeth. He blinks. It’s gone from his sight, and the sound of its pain leaves the air feeling emptier still.

Princetown before him. Behind him, the old forest and its old secrets. The desert has different creatures. The desert, terrible waste-land, has no creatures at all.

Sometimes things, here, take a little while to die and stay dead.

* * *

**iv.**

_Roland_.

The voice is soft in ways he can’t remember anymore. It’s soft because he’s made it so, chosen to hold it so, allowed himself to know that there was still a tenderness even at the end of it when she was insane and tired and alone. 

_Ro’, dear. Belle’s made breakfast. Come._

But she hasn’t, there isn’t, there’s nothing. He’s made and eaten his own breakfast (chicken eggs for the first time in weeks, even if mutie) and now he’s waiting for the coffee to heat. That’s all that’s there. It’s ground coffee instead of the chicory he’s used to because he stopped by the Princetown dispensary before starting his slow amble towards Tull, and then towards the desert. 

And then the mountains. 

The memory formed in the bridge of his nose. It was pushed into him by the smell of the coffee as it boiled, warm and earthy, rising up past the morning fog into the shape of too many things, all at once, on his chest, slithering past the mouth and down into the throat and sinking there to cave the sternum in. 

Squatting by the fire, he watches his new mule eat dried, yellow grass near the fence. The old woman stands at the top of her steps, shielded from the sun by the shade of her veranda, and watches the stranger who she let sleep in her muddy yard sip on fresh coffee from his tin mug, his back to her, his knees bent, his free hand idly dangling between them as his elbow rests on his thigh. 

His chambray shirt is discoloured and swells beneath the wind of an early dawn. 

“I wish I could offer you more than the eggs I gave ya last night, sai.” she says from her distance, squinting in the slowly rising sunlight. Roland half-turns in his crouch to acknowledge her, and nod, “But I ain’t got much to feed us, and the chickens can only give us so much. Not this close to the desert. The bean man ain’t come in a while and when he does he only got enough for me and Mable here.”

Mable watches the man from behind her grandmother’s shoulders. Her eyes are large and her lower lip is trapped endlessly between her teeth, worried and worried and worried. She looks like his sister if his sister had lived. The thought tumbled through his head the evening before as he filled his skins at the pump right by the gate and washed himself and he saw her watching him from the upper floor, the glass caked in dust, the girl at the window never quite the same, and it sat idly between his tongue and his lips before he spat it out to the side and didn’t think anything of it again.

“The eggs did me fine this morning. Thankee-sai.” 

He knocks back his head to finish the last of the coffee. He stands moving from his knees into his back, without needing his hands as a counterweight, and in her soft twenty years Mable feels a dark shiver inside her she cannot name with her grandmother present as the man’s broad shoulders rise to their full height.

He stomps the fire out and rolls his bedding tightly. The gunbelt he did not take off as he slept but he took out one gun to lay it beside his head along with the Deschain’s dagger. He sheathes the latter and holsters the former. His hat, next. His duster. 

The red scarf. 

He feels the women’s eyes all around him as he thoughtfully re-packs his _gunna_. The mug and the tin plate that he uses as a pan also. The jerky he sprinkled on the eggs to give them flavour. The matches, the gun oil (what little’s left of it), the deerskin cloth, the needle he uses to fix his clothing when it rips, the small whetstone for the dagger. His father’s miraculous bag of gold coins. 

He slings the pack over his shoulder and pulls the mule away from its feast of yellowed grass, coaxes it softly before mounting it. He looks behind at the women briefly, touches the brim of his hat, and says nothing before starting to move past the gate and back onto the road. 

His mother still standing by the water pump does not move. Mable haltingly waves goodbye. She regrets the gesture just as soon as she makes it. 


End file.
